Motivation as a key factor to improve freshmen academic performance in computer engineering courses

Since 2010 the Universitat Politècnica de València offers the bachelor degrees called “Grados”. The “Grados” follows the guidelines of the European Higher Education Area. Among them are specially relevant those giving students more participation on the education process and incorporating continuous evaluation. Because of the frustrating results obtained by students of the “Physical Fundamentals of Computer Engineering” course during the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 academic years, it was decided to examine strategies to overcome the low academic performance, but maintaining the common assessment policy. The general idea of our proposal is provide students with freedom to prepare their own strategies. To accomplish that, new assessment events were introduced along the term. Thus, students can take a test at the end of each unit, they can also take a midterm exam, combine freely both strategies, or even take a final exam. After applying the proposed strategies, on the one hand the final grades obtained by the students were better than in previous years, and on the other hand, the teacher observed a greater interest in the subject that leads to improve student engagement.